Reigns Supreme An Interview with Scott Fagen, Chief Products Officer at 21st Century Software By Denny Yost C 20 • OBOL continues to be a topic of discussion from many perspectives since many organizations still use this popular programming language for mission-critical applications throughout the world. Yet, many individuals are not very aware of this highly popular and widely used programming language, the main computing platform where it is used and why it is still being used. Enterprise Tech Journal recently sat down with Scott Fagen, the Chief Products Officer at 21st Century Software, to gain his insights into the world of COBOL. This is the first part of a long conversation with Scott with the remaining portions of the conversation to be published in separate future interviews. After all the separate COBOL conversations with Scott have been published, we will combine the separate COBOL conversations into a single digital publication for anyone to view. Enterprise Tech Journal: Scott, what is COBOL? Scott Fagen: COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) is a programming language invented in the late 1950s by a consortium called CODASYL (Conference/ Committee on Data Systems Languages) based on two business needs: • Develop a programming language, which is more accessible to non-technical humans. In the early days, computers were primarily programmed in low level assembler language or directly in machine language. This was a very technical task and was not Enterprise Tech Journal • 2020: Issue 3